Movie Reviews

Hope Springs Movie with Meryl Streep

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Written by Jonathan Jacobs

Hope Springs with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones

This story is as generic as any written this year. A man and his wife have drifted apart after thirty years of marriage. They sleep in separate bedrooms and rarely converse about their feelings and hopes and desires. Their marriage has become stale and moribund. The woman (played by Meryl Streep) decides to seek out counseling so that she may find a way to cope with her husband’s aloofness, and thus live the remainder of her married life as a happily married woman. Run on sentences abound folks. The husband (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones) is not atypical of the average seventy plus year old spouse. He is moody, serious, feels sluggish and he enjoys having a routine. Their lack of a septuagenarian’s sex life causes this woman to force her husband’s hand.

Onward the unhappy couple travels to Hope Springs. The husband is dragged kicking and screaming when his wife cashes in what amounts to her entire retirement fund in order to pay for therapy (the therapist is played by Steve Carell). Steve Carell looks ridiculous in this role. There is little room for his comedy relief because the script is incredibly grim. Viewers feel as though these two people are on the brink of a meltdown that will lead to divorce and ultimately to utter familial misery.

When not feuding and forcing their sexual fantasies to be revealed to their couple’s counselor, these two elderly individuals are asked to renew their romance. This includes giving each other blow jobs, having impossibly flexible sex in the kitchen, and teasing a threesome with the next-door neighbor.

Let’s now pause for a moment of reflection. Raise your hand if you would like to watch your grandparents go to couples therapy, possibly divorce, and at the very least have intercourse with or without Viagra and cardiac arrest?  Neither do I. Hope Springs with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones might well cut to the heart of the degradation of a marriage across time and space, but who the hell wants to confront that? Why invite divorce and misery and failure as an option? Thirty years together is not enough to prove that two people love each other? My goodness, Hope Springs is a freaking bummer.

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